A Probabilistic Framework for Quantifying Biological Complexity

TL;DR

This paper introduces Pathway Complexity, a probabilistic measure to distinguish biological from non-biological structures, aiding in the search for extraterrestrial biosignatures and understanding biological complexity.

Contribution

It proposes a novel complexity measure, Pathway Complexity, enabling rigorous probabilistic assessment of biological versus abiotic objects as biosignatures.

Findings

Pathway Complexity effectively thresholds the abiotic-biotic divide.

The approach allows unambiguous identification of biosignatures.

It can be used to explore extraterrestrial life and laboratory chemical systems.

Abstract

One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial communities and multicellular structures, the material configurations in biology can easily be distinguished from non-living material assemblies. This is also true of the products of complex organisms that can themselves construct complex tools, machines, and artefacts. Whilst these objects are not living, they cannot randomly form, as they are the product of a biological organism and hence are either technological or cultural biosignatures. The problem is that it is not obvious how it might be possible to generalise an approach that aims to evaluate complex objects as possible biosignatures. However, if it was possible such a self-contained approach could be useful to explore the cosmos for new life forms. This would require us to prove rigorously that a given artefact is too complex to have formed by chance. In this paper, we present a new type of complexity measure, Pathway Complexity, that allows us to not only threshold the abiotic-biotic divide, but to demonstrate a probabilistic approach based upon object abundance and complexity which can be used to unambiguously assign complex objects as biosignatures. We hope that this approach not only opens up the search for biosignatures beyond earth, but allow us to explore earth for new types of biology, as well as observing when a complex chemical system discovered in the laboratory could be considered alive.